Dr Bunsen Barnacle and I volunteered to help out on a delivery run to Skokholm Island yesterday. The crew of “shifters” were ferried out very fast on Helen Claire, one of the Dale Sailing diesel catamarans: heading into the wind outbound meant a good deal of spray! (And heaven knows how much fuel burnt).
Luckily the supplies were on KitCat, the Dale Sailing crane barge with its very strong long reach hydraulic crane, which lifted everything onto the raised quay; nevertheless there was plenty for us to do, shifting concrete beams and transferring many pallets’ worth of blocks onto the island dumper truck and “Gater”.
Between two uphill haulages I squeezed in a swim off the quay, quite closely observed by seals; but because of the hot work which followed I still needed another swim at Musselwick after getting home.
NB Skokholm hours are a tad under 120 minutes long: we were told “about 5 hours”, but we left Neyland at just after 06.30 and returned at 16.15.
Photo below from the Skokholm blog; I hope they don’t mind!
